Does America Need More Innovators?
by Matthew Wisnioski (Editor, Contributor), Eric S. Hintz (Editor, Contributor), Marie Stettler Kleine (Editor, Contributor), Humera Fasihuddin (Contributor), Leticia Britos Cavagnaro (Contributor), & more

About the Author
Matthew Wisnioski is Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech and the author of Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America (MIT Press).
Contributors
Errol Arkilic, Catherine Ashcraft, Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, W. Bernard Carlson, Lisa D. Cook, Humera Fasihuddin, Maryann Feldman, Erik Fisher, Benoît Godin, Jenn Gustetic, David Guston, Eric S. Hintz, Marie Stettler Kleine, Dutch MacDonald, Mickey McManus, Sebastian Pfotenhauer, Natalie Rusk, Andrew L. Russell, Lucinda M. Sanders, Brenda Trinidad, Lee Vinsel, Matthew Wisnioski

About this book
A critical exploration of today's global imperative to innovate, by champions, critics, and reformers of innovation.
Corporate executives, politicians, and school board leaders agree―Americans must innovate. Innovation experts fuel this demand with books and services that instruct aspiring innovators in best practices, personal habits, and workplace cultures for fostering innovation. But critics have begun to question the unceasing promotion of innovation, pointing out its gadget-centric shallowness, the lack of diversity among innovators, and the unequal distribution of innovation's burdens and rewards. Meanwhile, reformers work to make the training of innovators more inclusive and the outcomes of innovation more responsible. This book offers an overdue critical exploration of today's global imperative to innovate by bringing together innovation's champions, critics, and reformers in conversation.
The book presents an overview of innovator training, exploring the history, motivations, and philosophies of programs in private industry, universities, and government; offers a primer on critical innovation studies, with essays that historicize, contextualize, and problematize the drive to create innovators; and considers initiatives that seek to reform and reshape what it means to be an innovator.

Brief contents
1 The Innovator Imperative 1
I Champions
2 Introduction 17
3 An Innovators’ Movement 25
4 Building High-Performance Teams for Collaborative Innovation 51
5 Raising the NSF Innovation Corps 69
6 Making Innovators, Building Regions 83
7 Innovation for Every American 105
II Critics
8 Introduction 133
9 How Innovation Evolved from a Heretical Act to a Heroic Imperative 141
10 Failed Inventor Initiatives, from the Franklin Institute to Quirky 165
11 Building Global Innovation Hubs: The MIT Model in Three Start-Up Universities 191
12 The Innovation Gap in Pink and Black 221
13 Make Maintainers: Engineering Education and an Ethics of Care 249
III Reformers
14 Introduction 273
15 Designing Learning Environments That Engage Young People as Creators 281
16 Using the Past to Make Innovators 299
17 Confronting the Absence of Women in Technology Innovation 323
18 Making Responsible Innovators 345
19 Remaking the Innovator Imperative 367
Contributors 375
Index 379

Series: Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation series
Pages: 410
Publisher: The MIT Press (April 9, 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0262536730
ISBN-13: 978-0262536738